Dealing with career go-slows

During a workshop a couple of weeks ago with some public servants in a government  agency in Abuja, participants raised serious concerns about how long it took for them to get promoted. According to the group of “newbies” who just joined the public service, promotion exams come only once in 4 years or so, and even at that the promotions are not guaranteed. The employees were generally frustrated with how long this took and thought it was something that the agency’s management needed to re-consider. In my usual style, my responses were perhaps not what they expected. If they were looking for sympathy, I was definitely the wrong man for the job. I generally take a more practical and realistic view when it comes to these issues, and I was brutally honest in my feedback, which I think a wider audience needs to be exposed to – since I am sure that their sentiments are pervasive across our public sector.

 

Luckily I had some of the members of the “old guard” in the classroom, so I turned to them to ask: How was it 30 years ago when your agency was founded? Their response confirmed my theory: “promotions came every one to two years”. This got the concerned newbies even more agitated, until I responded with a follow-up question: what was the staff strength then compared to now: “one-fifth” they responded, and to my third question: are you supervising more or less institutions now than then (since they are a regulatory agency), and alas: they are actually supervising less institutions now than in the past. If you are getting the trend of this conversation you will appreciate my take on this: How do you expect faster promotions when you are over-bloated, less-productive and bottom-heavy with fewer vacancies at the narrower top. My solution: Be honest to yourself and realistic: you should understand the realities of your organization, and learn either to cope and make the most of the situation or find a job elsewhere where you will get the faster career advancement that you are looking for. For example, I used to work in an investment bank which had just over 75 professional staff when I joined. Promotion opportunities were faster in those early days because as we grew, improved productivity and achieved better results, people were promoted from within to take up higher levels of responsibility. It wasn’t surprising for people to earn 7 promotions in 9 years. It wasn’t the same in larger banks and financial institutions that were not growing as fast as we were on an annualized basis at that time. In my current firm, which is even smaller, people have received promotions sometimes twice in a year, and we have a number of fresh graduate to Executive Director moves in a five-year time-frame.

 

The lesson: understand the realities of your organization and the stage in the life-cycle in which the organization is, so that you can take better decisions about how to manage your career rather than whining and complaining about stuff that you don’t fully understand nor that you can ever change. From a policy perspective however, I will strongly advocate that career management in our public service needs a fresh strategy. I recommend that when public servants reach about 45 years they should be ‘encouraged” to take an early retirement and incentivized to establish a business – perhaps funded by government grants/loans and possibly secured by a lien on a portion of their Retirement Savings Accounts (with the necessary amendments to the Pension Reform Act) – leaving only about 15% of mid-career professionals to ascend to the fewer Director-level positions that are available, and opening up opportunities for younger professionals who are truly adding value (in a transparent performance management system) to move faster in the less dense structure that will emerge. I believe that this will help with not only career management, but with creating a more productive, corruption-free public service, and even bolstering our entrepreneurial development drive (which I think is currently misguided by a deliberate focus on youth entrepreneurship, which is not as effective as a well managed mid-career entrepreneurship drive).

 

Back to our conversations at the workshop: as if my analysis and remarks were not bad enough, I reminded the participants in my usual brutal honesty that most of them who had come from the private sector into mid to senior positions in the public sector should be honest to themselves and recognize that the transition to government was really an opportunity to “cool off”, get a slice of the “national cake”, and spend the rest of their careers in a less hectic and aggressive environment than the private sector they came from. For the fresh hires, I reminded them (just in case they had forgotten) that most of them got these jobs in the first place not necessarily because they merited them, but because their names were on lists handed to the Chief Executives of government agencies from politicians, traditional rulers and other power-brokers to whom these CEOs were loyal. With this realization in mind, I urged them and others who are reading right now and have similar concerns to do what our old Principal at Kings College taught us many years ago: SHUT UP AND SERVE!

 

Omagbitse Barrow